Ron Paul's "Gimmick"
By Zephyr Teachout, 11/06/2007 - 11:51am

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So the New York Times takes a crack at understanding Ron Paul's extraordinary fundraising efforts, and here's what they come up with:

Its a gimmick.

Gimmick?

American Heritage Dictionary: "A device employed to cheat, deceive, or trick, especially a mechanism for the secret and dishonest control of gambling apparatus."

Or according to the Online etymology dictionary, "a device for making a fair game crooked," possibly an anagram of magic.

When candidates use bundlers to raise millions of dollars, that's a gimmick. Whatever is happening with Paul, its no gimmick.

I believe that Meetups--along with other distributed devices--had to play a massive role. And not because they are gimmicks, because they are tools that are not about the tools, but about people coming together. When the call went out to fundraise, Paul had over 1,000 Meetup groups to call on--each group, presumably, full of people with dozens of other friends. Over 12,000 events have been held for Paul. Do you think these people would call their 10 friends when asked?:

Click for picture.

Want to see a real gimmick? Check out Huckabee's effort to raise money by making people pay to reveal pictures of Huckabee's life on a
set of tiles. That's classic consultant-gimmick-land. Its amazing how quickly having money to pay for consultants can ruin a good web operation.


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Thanks Zephyr for the love.

Thanks Zephyr for the love. Same set of consultants for Huckabee. Proud to be one of them.

By Chris Maiorana at Tue, 11/06/2007 - 12:58pm | login or register to post comments

Classic Consultant-gimmick-land?

Zeph,

Perhaps you could enlighten us with some examples of how what Huckabee is doing is "classic". Also, "making people pay to reveal pictures of Huckabee's life"? The last time I saw a change in perception this drastic was watching Anakin Skywalker turn to the dark side in Episode 3.

What Huckabee is doing is providing an interesting and novel way for supporters and new visitors to track his fund raising efforts and learn more about his life, and road leading to his run for President. How you equate this to a gimmick or classic is dense.

So you don't have to go to the Dictionary:

Perception: A way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression.

Dense: Hard to understand because of complexity of ideas.

By homestar at Tue, 11/06/2007 - 1:30pm | login or register to post comments

Chuckling over here. I

Chuckling over here.

I believe in Craigslist, civic society, the typos on your blog posts, the hangin' curveball, low tech, good Scotch, that the strategic memos of Mark Penn are self-indulgent c**p...I believe in the sweet spot, the daily show, reading the polls Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, difficult, issue based campaigns where muscular ideas are debated.

Its cute. Its intended to entice. It feels like Hucksupporters are being marketed to instead of depended upon. That, to me, is a gimmick.

By Zephyr Teachout at Tue, 11/06/2007 - 4:23pm | login or register to post comments

Thanks for the reply

Appreciated the comment and feedback from an outsiders perspective. I can assure you it is meant more as a fun interactive way for supporters and onlooker to have a place to watch the progress and less about a marketing plan.

If you think it's cute now, wait until later this month, you never know what's behind the next tile, or the next poll for that matter.

By homestar at Tue, 11/06/2007 - 6:17pm | login or register to post comments

Ron Paul Revolutionary

You guys should organize a one day tile-ripping event.

Turn the gimmick into something newsworthy and make it fun and interesting.

That's what we would do.

By Tex MacRae at Tue, 11/06/2007 - 10:12pm | login or register to post comments



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